Systematic Hatreds

Donald Trump grew up and started his career in New York City construction and real estate, two industries that are, as we say, organized crime-adjacent. It’s no surprise, then, that he continually reapplies the lessons of small-time Queens grifters to geopolitics—most recently with his announcement that the United States, not the Iranians, will be levying a 20 percent tariff on goods passing through the Strait of Hormuz: This is, quite literally, a protection racket.

A bit of a diversion, for me at least; we’ll get back to politics soon. We love to say our preferences are universal. OK, see what I did there? Logicians might say I committed a logical fallacy—a hasty generalization; advocates might point out that I offered no evidence at all; rhetoricians might more charitably describe what I’ve done as a handshake. I want to add at least a fourth: I spoke in the phony universal. The phony universal is ubiquitous on the Internet.

In Internet argot, “The Cool Zone” is a period that’s fun to read about and crap to live through. For many leftists, for instance, there’s the French Revolution—bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, pants-wetting was it in that afternoon to approach the guillotine. I’m not sure what the paradigmatic rightist Cool Zone would be (the Crusades?) but you can fill in the blanks.

A few years ago, as part of a project that still hasn’t come to fruition (I’m stealing some time from it to write this up, in fact), we surveyed some Americans about what they thought made countries high or low status in international politics. This wasn’t scientific or extensive—it was a genuine pilot—but nevertheless pilots can be informative if your goal is to get low-resolution images of public opinion and you’re not sampling on something that’s clearly biasing your results.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to deliver a keynote at the APSA Virtual Research Meeting on “Political Science Under Pressure.” (When I said yes, I thought I’d been asked onto a panel; I quickly realized I’d signed up for a full 75-minute keynote.) What follows is an edited transcript with selected slides. This is too long for email — my gosh, this is long — so at some point you’ll need to click through.

Yes, this is chatGPT art, but, like, come on. As in earlier installments (see below), I have been taking my reading notes for my Nuclear Weapons and World Politics course and turning them into Substack essays. This week, in light of President Trump balancing nuclear strategy and attending the ur-macho UFC event in Florida, it seems apposite to share today’s notes on Carol Cohn’s “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”.

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What’s the point of senators making laws now? Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

A classic international relations argument highlights the risks of “chain-ganging”.1 If your security is tied to that of an alliance partner, then a risky action—like starting a war—by that partner might cause you to enter into a war: In multipolarity, the approximate equality of alliance partners leads to a high degree of security interdependence within an alliance.

China’s nuclear arsenal, long kept at modest levels, is growing rapidly. The Pentagon estimates that the PRC will be near-parity with the United States and Russia, long the world’s leading nuclear powers, by 2030. Do Americans care? I set out to answer one part of this question thanks to an unusual opportunity. Verasight, a survey research firm I have worked with previously, offered previous clients a chance to field one or two questions on a nationally representative omnibus survey.

Normally, one criticizes a Paul Krugman argument at some risk to oneself. Given that I earned one of my lowest college grades in macroeconomics—Krugman's specialty—I rarely have occasion to do anything but nod along when he writes on his core topics. But his most recent column is so off-base that it deserves a response.